The BOistan KGB, The Deep State

Are Deep-State Leakers Defending Democracy or Corroding It? - The Atlantic:

There is a good reason that Putin is the head of Russia today -- he got there the old fashioned way for a totalitarian state. By working for the KGB, getting the goods on the people he needed to take down, blackmail, etc. Chuck Schiumer knows how the game is played in totalitarian states, of which BOistan is one.

As a general rule, it’s probably unwise to pick a fight with spies, a point Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made in early January. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he said. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

As we saw during the BO years, the IRS attacked  conservative organizations, then took the 5th and walked away. The donor lists they got and handed out to "The Party" were used to shake down more people that failed to bow to TP, as in Wisconsin. 

Even The Atlantic has a rudimentary understanding here of the threat of the Administrative State we already have. 

Yet Schumer’s warning, even if realistic, is chilling: Not only does it raise the possibility of unelected, faceless bureaucrats using classified information to retaliate against a duly elected president, but that comes in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the Obama years. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed the vast powers that the NSA had accrued and could use, even on American citizens, with little or no oversight.

Naturally, The Atlantic makes some odd connection between our massive Administrative State and Turkey (of all places) and concludes that "nothing to see here, move along".

The idea of a “Deep State” constraining Trump was not new. Back in February, when the idea of a President Trump still seemed wildly implausible, Megan McArdle wrote that he wouldn’t be able to do that much damage even if he won, thanks to bureaucrats who could slow-walk or even block his priorities. “This is the reality: Most of what you want to do to Washington won’t get done—and neither will much of what you want to get done outside of it, if you insist on taking Washington on,” she wrote. After the inauguration, some liberals took new heart in that idea.

This is OLD news -- Reagan was beset by pieces of the Federal Beauracracy that simply ingnored him, and this was even after PATCO. The ability of a president to fight the Administrative State is more limited today than it was then -- if Trump can do it, he is a complete genius.

There is no reason that the FBI should have been inestigating Flynn  ... so it was an internal government move to get him out. The most worrisome thing for me is that Trump went for it.
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